On March 26 and March 27, experts who staunchly disagree with one another—and sometimes even clash in courtrooms—sat down in Eaton Hall to engage in civil, moderated dialogue. This was the Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education’s (CEVIHE) first conference, bringing together policymakers, researchers, legal scholars, and advocates to examine and debate the “Regulation of Vice.” The Tufts Tribune spoke with these experts about their experience and whether such conversations will lead to productive change in their respective fields. The conference posed a broader question: how effective is CEVIHE at serving as a forum for distinguished experts on opposite sides of an issue to hash out their ideas?
According to CEVIHE student representative Lucy Morisse-Corsetti, the conference originated from a paper that she wrote with help from Professor Eitan Hersh, CEVIHE’s inaugural director, inspired by a reading in his American Conservatism class, published in American Storylines on Substack. In that paper, she researched marijuana, gambling, and pornography, finding that these issues are characterized by inconsistent legality and varying restrictions across the states. While there was agreement amongst Americans in favor of more regulation, there was less consensus as to how many regulations there should be before they start to unduly infringe on an individual’s freedom. CEVIHE wanted to explore how to go about regulating these behaviors, grouping them under the umbrella term “vices.”
High student involvement was a strong point of the conference. “We had excellent attendance on the panel. For the students who came to watch the conference during the day, a couple of people came intending only to stay for twenty minutes and then ended up staying the entire day,” said Morisse-Corsetti. “For people who made an attempt to tap in, I think the conference struck a chord with them.”
Panelists presented differing opinions as to which vices the conference should address. Going into the conference, some panelists took issue with the chosen topics, believing that some of the vices were too different from one another to be addressed in conjunction. Richard Daynard, Distinguished Professor of Law and President of the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University, said that he did not see many commonalities between the issues related to gambling, pornography, and marijuana.
Isaac Rose-Berman, a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men specializing in gambling research, noted to the Tribune that he was concerned coming into the conference that grouping several issues would lead to oversimplification. “I initially thought there would be a lot of nuance lost,” he said. By the end of the conference, however, Rose-Berman began to recognize that there was a decent amount of overlap, saying that “the disagreements about marijuana or gambling have similar undertones.”
Despite this, he believed that pornography is more difficult to compare. “Pornography is tricky, because it is a much more sensitive or sheltered topic, and people are less inclined to talk about it,” he said. “The actual business model is also very different in that the vast majority of people who consume pornography never pay for it, unlike with gambling or marijuana.”
Ela Darling, adult industry entrepreneur and advocate, agrees that the conference did not seem like an effective place to discuss the industry. “I don’t think there’s as much overlap between us and the other two,” she said. “I think alcohol and tobacco were glaringly absent in the conversation. Those [topics] would be a really good fit for that conversation in a way that perhaps ours wasn’t.”
Mark Sternman, Chief of Staff for Massachusetts State Senator John Keenan, also believes alcohol was noticeably absent from the conversation. “Alcohol, in my judgement, probably does as much or more damage to society as those other issues, not to say they are not damaging,” he said.
In spite of criticisms, Morisse-Corsetti explained that while alcohol and tobacco fall under the idea of a “traditional vice,” they are different from marijuana, pornography, and gambling, which are more controversial and lack a common understanding of how they ought to be regulated. “As a society, we’ve generally figured out how we want to deal with alcohol and tobacco, although it still ebbs and flows a bit as new products develop,” she noted. “We haven’t figured out how to address the other three vices.”
Arik Burakovsky, CEVIHE’s associate director, noted that the three topics were intentionally paired in order to explore the ways their regulation may intersect. “There are clear overlaps across these areas in terms of autonomy, harm, commercialization, and the role of technology, but there are also real differences in legal frameworks and public attitudes,” Burakovsky said. “We wanted to better understand where those analogies are useful and where they break down.”
Another concern raised was over the language used to describe the topics at hand: not all participants liked the connotations of the term “vice,” arguing that the term is moralizing and wrongly attributes blame. “[When] you think of vice, you think about people behaving in ways they shouldn’t,” said Daynard. “It carefully puts the onus and the spotlight on the wrong side.”
If anything, Daynard believes corporations should take the blame. “If somebody is doing something vicious—something egregious—it’s the people who designed the gambling platforms,” he continued. “It’s not the people who are told that this is just innocent fun, many of whom get sucked into an addiction that ends up taking their time, their money, their friends and relationships, and in many cases, their lives.”
Darling agrees that vice is an unproductive way to frame the discussion. “Vice immediately channels criminalization,” she said. “I think it is inherently, to some degree, divisive, especially in these spaces.”
Sternman echoed these concerns, arguing that the term vice stigmatizes innocent people who need help. “Vice is a judgmental term, and porn addiction or substance-use problems are usually beyond their control,” he said. “You shouldn’t blame someone for having a physical illness. Likewise, blaming someone for an addiction seems wrong.”
Morisse-Corsetti said that CEVIHE did not intend the term to be moralizing. “It’s the best term we could find that works as an umbrella,” she said. She explained that while drafting the paper, she had accepted “vice” as a good, albeit imperfect catch-all for these three issues. However, she expressed that the conference and conversations with panelists pushed her thinking on the topic and forced her to consider the positive and negative implications of the term. “I think critical discussion about what terminology we use around these issues is an important conversation that needs to keep happening,” she said.
Another point of contention was what policy tools should be implemented to address the problems at stake. “Some participants emphasized the role of prohibition or supply restrictions, while others focused on harm reduction, consumer protection, and the risks of pushing activity into unregulated markets,” said Burakovsky. “There was also openness to alternative models, such as state-run systems or noncommercial approaches, even if people were realistic about how hard they would be to implement in practice.”
Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who studies crime, drugs, and disorder, said that he appreciated the discussions, which gave him the opportunity to think critically about policy approaches to different vices. “My hope is that they’ll at least generate good research ideas,” he said.
However, Lehman identified what he sees as a core flaw in the discussion: the fact that participants couldn’t compromise on fundamental aspects of the issues. “Disagreements about first principles made it hard to advance concrete policy solutions—it’s hard to get to policy when you don’t agree about right and wrong,” he said. This tension was evident when some panelists framed addictive behaviors as “vices” while others rejected those terms altogether and viewed the behaviors as being relatively unproblematic or even positive. Rose-Berman, for instance, suggested that gambling can actually have a positive social impact when it’s done in groups.
Burakovsky explained that because the panelists had different underlying goals, they approached the topics from varying angles. “Are we trying to reduce overall use, reduce the most serious harms, protect young people, limit corporate power, or preserve individual freedom? People enter these conversations with different priorities, which shape how they evaluate policy,” he said.
Rose-Berman believes that the discussions and connections from the conference can serve as a starting point that may lead to incremental, rather than immediate, change in the policy realm. “The output of the conference wasn’t several policies [that] are going to be adopted right now that we give to policymakers to implement in two weeks—that’s unrealistic given the complicated regulatory environment,” Rose-Berman said. “I think people definitely came away with new ideas about how different policies can and should work. In that sense, it was quite productive.”
While the conference may not have resulted in any substantive policy proposals, it offered participants a framework to build off of. “One of the moderators on the panels suggested a book that I had never heard of that might provide guidance on legislation that Senator Keenan files in the future,” Sternman noted.
Some believe that the conference will have a less meaningful impact. Daynard says that while he is grateful for the conference and enjoyed talking to the experts in the room, it did not change his opinion on the issues. “I don’t think that the discussions were extended or detailed enough to lead directly to real-world outcomes,” he said. “In the short term, I doubt it. Longer term, it’s hard to know, because the subjects the conference raised could lead to further discussions.”
As for the success of CEVIHE’s first-ever conference, the jury is still out. The possibility of CEVIHE serving as a platform for substantive dialogue on controversial topics in the future remains open, though, with Burakovsky expressing optimism for future programming. “I think the conference went very well, but it also made clear where we can improve next time,” Burakovsky said. “Going forward, we want to build on this by continuing the conversation, refining the research questions that emerged from it, and bringing in additional perspectives. The goal is to treat this as the beginning of an evolving research agenda rather than a one-off event.”
Photo by Jack Smart